On Cervantes is a first-rate collection
of critical studies, and as such it is a most fitting tribute to a man whose
patient and thorough scholarship, generosity, and intellectual integrity
have inspired so many colleagues and students. Like many other
Festschriften, it is eclectic, imposing no particular thematic or
critical-theoretical tendency. Rather, On Cervantes reflects the diverse
interests of its seventeen contributors. James Parr is to be commended for
bringing together these articles, and despite a few typographical problems
(results, I suspect, of other computer programs having trouble talking to
Juan de la Cuesta's computer), the overall quality of the book is
admirable.
While the diversity of critical approaches
embodied in the seventeen essays makes it hard to give a single unifying
characterization to the anthology,

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I find a noteworthy contrast between those articles that reflect more traditional
approaches and others that judiciously employ the perspectives of more
contemporary critical theory. In effect, On Cervantes brings together
essays that exemplify solid and thorough erudition, and other studies that
focus more on the imaginative act of reading. It is appropriate that Cervantes
the author whose most famous book contributed so much to the formation
of the modern reader and to the concepts of self-reflexivity
should inspire essays of practical criticism that utilize the insights of
deconstruction and other post-modern critical concepts but that also acknowledge
and avoid their excesses. Good examples of this latter would include the
essay by James Parr, Plato, Cervantes, Derrida: Framing Speaking and
Writing in Don Quixote, and also the articles by Edward Friedman
and Michael McGaha.
In addition to Parr's study, the other contributors
and their articles are as follows: Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce (El narrador
y Sansón Carrasco), Jean Canavaggio (La conversión
del rufián dichoso: fuentes y recreación), Aurora Egido
(Los silencios del Persiles), Alban Forcione (Marcela
and Grisóstomo and the Consummation of La Galatea), Edward
Friedman (Reading Inscribed: Don Quixote and the Parameters
of Fiction), Carroll B. Johnson (The Old Order Passeth, or Does
It? Some Thoughts on Community, Commerce, and Alienation in Rinconete
y Cortadillo), Jacques Joset (Autores traduttori
traditori: Don Quijote y Cien años de soledad
(II)), Francisco Márquez Villanueva (La tía
fingida: literatura universitaria), Michael McGaha
(Intertextuality as a Guide to the Interpretation of the Battle of
the Sheep [Don Quixote, I, 18]), Augustin Redondo (Nuevo
examen del episodio de los molinos de viento [Don Quijote, I, 8]),
Elias L. Rivers (Genres and Voices in the Viaje del
Parnaso), Julio Rodríguez-Luis (On Closure and
Openendedness in the Two Quijotes), Alberto Sánchez
(Don Quijote, rapsoda del romancero viejo), Karl-Ludwig Selig
(Don Quixote I, 16 and the Ludic Spirit of the Text),
Alan S. Trueblood (The puntualidades of Cide Hamete and the
menudencias of Don Quixote), and Eduardo Urbina (Forse
altri canterà . . .: nuevos avatares del mito quijotesco
en The Mosquito Coast [1982], Monsignor Quijote [1982] y Don
Quixote [1986]).
As the above list indicates, Don Quijote
gets the lion's share of the attention, with twelve of the seventeen essays
treating aspects of this work. Cervantes' drama, the Viaje del Parnaso,
the Persiles, and La Galatea receive one essay each. The
Novelas ejemplares are dealt with by only two of the contributors.
While this priority is hardly surprising, it is at least from this
reader's perspective a bit disappointing, given that much critical
attention has recently been turned to the other major works, notably the
Persiles and the Novelas ejemplares. In any case, different
readers will find their own favorites among these articles, for the most
insightful, most imaginative, or most painstakingly researched; but the
predominating impression with which one concludes a reading of the whole
is the fully predictable one of renewed respect for the quality and originality
of the intellectual questions and answers that Cervantes' writing can elicit.

134

WILLIAM H.
CLAMURRO

Cervantes

At the risk of seeming to imply a judgment
of relative quality, I would like to mention two essays that particularly
impressed me, in each case for very different reasons. First, Forcione's
Marcela and Grisóstomo and the Consummation of La
Galatea is noteworthy not only for its thorough erudition, imaginative
reading, and lucid argument, but also for its illumination of the deeply
integrated continuities in Cervantes' thought, as manifested in his recurrent
explorations of the harmonies and disharmonies of the structures of literature
(or the beliefs embodied in literary convention) as opposed to the realities
of life. In articulating the complex relationship of continuity and consummation,
between the Galatea and the Marcela/Grisóstomo episode of Don
Quijote, Part I, Forcione finds a deeper issue. As he states near his
conclusion, The Marcela and Grisóstomo episode, then, allows
the tensions that occasionally trouble Cervantes' erotic pastoral and reassert
themselves most forcefully at its non-conclusion, to erupt and resolve themselves
conclusively. With the death of Grisóstomo and the vanishing of Marcela,
Cervantes has quite literally ended his rewritten Galatea and with
it any possibility of erotic pastoral, clearly disclosing the fictive nature
of the love and the object of love which animate it and the emptiness of
the poetic tradition it honors (61-2).
While some may disagree with Forcione's
conclusions, admittedly somewhat pessimistic, his approach strikes me as
valid, in that it suggests the necessity of reading together, as it were,
two texts clearly distinct in form, intention, and epoch, in order to understand
adequately what the later text and in fact, the more general Cervantine
project is trying to tell us.
Carroll B. Johnson's essay, by contrast, confronts
a familiar yet baffling text, Rinconete y Cortadillo. Continuing with
a methodological approach previously applied to La española
inglesa, Johnson goes beyond conventional and intrinsically
literary approaches to this quasi-picaresque vignette, and instead
considers the implications of the socio-economic context of the times. In
the curiously static world of this text, the reader gropes for a Cervantine
concern that transcends the string of sit-com interludes. Before this challenge,
Johnson has chosen to explore the implications of social and economic
organization reflected in the text. As he states most succinctly,
Monipodio and his group represent the feudo-monarchical social order
enshrined in the majoritarian literary genres noted above; Rinconete and
Cortadillo seem instead to have something to do with bourgeois capitalism
and the picaresque (92). His conclusion that Rinconete
and Cortadillo are the representatives of the new order, destined not to
flourish but to be crushed by the old and that Cervantes encodes
a revolutionary ideological statement, a kind of lament for the bourgeois
capitalism that was not to be, in the superficially humorous anatomy of a
picaresque crime syndicate (103) may not convince all
cervantistas, but his well-argued consideration of the historical
context certainly justifies the notion that we should return to the Novelas
ejemplares better armed with a knowledge of the socio-economic contexts
of the worlds within which these texts were composed and with which their
language is subtly and densely infused.

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Johnson's essay, like Forcione's and so many
of the others in On Cervantes, opens up a familiar work by opening
our attention outward, by going beyond conventional approaches and
familiarly literary perspectives. That the writings of Cervantes
would inspire, in all these articles, such examples of broad, patient scholarship
and of daring assertion and unexpected discoveries should surprise no one.
That this fine anthology has come into being, meanwhile, is cause for gratitude
and sincere appreciation. One must thank all involved Professor Parr,
all the contributors, Professor Murillo and of course Cervantes.